Embracing uncertainty, from economic policy to space colonization

Throughout his 50-year career, Charles Manski has had a broad taste in research, publishing work for both academic and mainstream audiences on a wide range of policy topics including financial aid for college students, pandemic response, clinical medicine and climate policy.

In his most recent book, “Discourse on Social Planning under Uncertainty,” published this month by Cambridge University Press, Manski unites three of his main research interests: evaluating public programs, welfare economics and decision theory.

“My whole program of work, including this book and the two previous books, ‘Public Policy in an Uncertain World’ and ‘Patient Care under Uncertainty,’ has been in pursuit of the same ultimate goals — to improve public policy by appropriately facing up to uncertainty and choosing policies that make sense with the uncertainty,” said Manski, the Board of Trustees Professor in Economics at Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research.

Decision-making is something he is uniquely equipped to think about. His research trajectory arose from the abstract, mathematical side of economics called partial identification.

“It means the stuff you want to learn that you don’t have good data on. And since you can’t pin it down, you put a bound on it, as something between this and this,” he said.

For Manski, the whole point of doing this work was to be able to evaluate whether public programs are actually effective and to advocate for better decisions in the future.

Northwestern Now asked Manski about his approach to public policy and which social problems on the horizon vex him the most.

Why do you quote the preamble to the U.S. Constitution at the beginning of your book? And how do economists measure “general welfare?”

An objective of the U.S. Constitution is to “promote the general Welfare.” Americans will need to be continually reminded of the Constitution and this aim in the years ahead. 

Obviously not everyone values the same thing, but we should have some empirical basis for what the people want. It shouldn’t be some king or dictator just doing what they want. And it has to be analytically tractable.

Economists write down mathematically what is going on in society. For example, you consider healthcare, consumption, the state of the environment, religious freedoms and gender equity. The total is social welfare. How good is this policy? How good is that? Economists filter the options through a social welfare function, aiming to get to the best option.  

What is the downside of not factoring uncertainty into policy planning? How do you make decisions when outcomes are uncertain?

Lots of people don't want to face up to uncertainties — researchers do it, too. If there’s really uncertainty, then what looks like a good thing to do at the time may turn out to be a really bad thing. It’s a question of trying to reduce the rate and severity of mishaps.

If there’s one idea that I push heavily that has not been pushed in public policy as far as I know by anybody else, it’s the idea of diversification. Everyone understands you need to diversify stocks and bonds. Diversifying policy, as a way of limiting the degree of damage by mishaps, makes perfect sense to me.

I published an op-ed on diversifying COVID-19 policy in response to a Washington Post op-ed that said, look, we’ve got this hodgepodge of policies, and what we need is one uniform policy across all the states.

I argued that different states enacting different policies was the right thing because there will be two benefits. One will be the diversification benefit of not putting all our eggs in one basket — because at least someone will get it right — even if it’s not everybody. The other thing is if different states do different things, it will give us an opportunity to learn.

Your book takes a surprising twist for a pragmatic treatise on public policy planning. How does your plea for space colonization reflect your theme of planning under uncertainty?

I ended the book with an essay about space colonization which I wrote in the early 1980s before the fall of the Soviet Union. At that time, I was most worried about nuclear war. Now there is so much to worry about, including nuclear wars, because of the resurgence of Russia.

While the benefits of progress are clear, our capacity to do damage has simultaneously increased. Nuclear arms controls may mitigate but will not eliminate the risks we now face. The probability is at some point we will fail to prevent nuclear war. Space colonization is insurance for human survival.

Space colonization isn’t just a NASA problem. They can do the engineering, but it also requires developing systems so that humans can live with each other. We don't want to go out to the moon en masse and just kill ourselves up there, which is very possible with humans.

Should a species that has driven itself to the precipice of extinction be entitled to occupy other planets and galaxies?

I prefer to believe that the good in humanity outweighs the bad and that we can mature as a race. To do so, we must first survive.